


Lovely Thorns and Singing Vultures

by opalescentgold



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), The Addams Family (Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Everybody Lives, Humor, M/M, Major Character Injury, Mild Gore, Resurrection, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-16 08:11:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14160507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/opalescentgold/pseuds/opalescentgold
Summary: “My only regret is that we’ve known each other for so short a time,” Q confesses, soft and dreamy. “If we’re not to have time together in life, then I wouldn’t mind being together in death. I’d like to be buried with you, if you’d allow it.”





	Lovely Thorns and Singing Vultures

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ViolyntFemme](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViolyntFemme/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Death of Q](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/367491) by 10kiaoi. 



> For the MI6 Cafe Resurrection Challenge, which has two parts: death and resurrection. 
> 
> I was paired up with the highly skilled 10kiaoi, who drew a gorgeous, gorgeous piece of artwork [here](http://10kiaoi.tumblr.com/post/172421826034/ill-come-back-for-you-it-was-all-bond-could) for the death aspect. Do check it out and lavish her with your praise. 
> 
> This here is the resurrection aspect. All the thanks to Linorien and pigfarts23 for the quick edits! Also, a gift for the amazing ViolyntFemme in the hopes of brightening up her day! 
> 
> Edit: dedicated at least partially to afaapm because she deserves nice things. 
> 
> As of now, this fic is complete. However, I may or may not add chapters to it later when I don't have so much on my plate.

“Clean and simple with no anticipated complications.”

Bond knows these are cursed words. Every single time this phrase shows up in his mission file, he inevitably ends up on the run from the local authorities and yet another global terrorist organization, flames licking at his feet and his Walther a molten lump lost in debris.

This time is different though. This time, he has Q, his lover of three months, with him.

And Q…

Q is hurt.

“Q! Q, come on, stick with me,” Bond orders, keeping his voice from shaking through a combination of experience and desperation. He presses down firmly on the gunshot wound and swallows down bile when his fingers go wet with blood. Q’s blood.

_Oh god._

He warned M, didn’t he, that bringing an exec out into the field was madness? So what if Q was the only one who could have hacked the system once they reached the enemy base; so what if Q saved the lives of thousands of people?

If M hadn’t made that call, then Q wouldn’t be _here_ , bleeding out.

Bond’s heart races in his ears, guilt screaming sharp and heavy in his chest. Knowing that horror will do him no good, he reaches for the cold, ascetic space inside of his head, where he goes when he needs to brutalize enemies and prioritize lives, but it’s a thin shield of sanity.

Past the emotionless chill, he can still see the guilt and fright underneath.

This is, as always, his fault.

Their initial infiltration of the base had gone fine. Q was surprisingly well-versed in climbing up a grappling rope and picking locks. He trailed silently after Bond like a beautiful black shadow, moving with a fluidity that even 007 had admired. When they reached the central control system, Q took charge, hacking in while Bond stood watch.

It was when Q was in their system and reading over all of their data that things began to go wrong.

Q found a live bomb planted in the crowded plaza of the city, armed to go off in twenty minutes. Intricately, gorgeously designed, Q explained as they hurried to leave, smiling with a delighted edge of intrigue. Normal authorities wouldn’t know the first thing about disarming it; there wasn’t enough time for the bomb experts to work through the schematics.

They would have to do it themselves.

Except, right as they were stepping into the streets of Jakarta, Q was shot by a guard. Bond promptly felled the guard with three shots to the head, but by then, it was too late. He had already thoroughly failed Q.

A through and through in his chest - _too close to the vitals_ , Bond’s mind shrieked, _far too close_ \- and he only made it two more streets down with 007’s help before Bond was forced to break into a closed construction building to the right in the hopes of giving Q as much protection as he could.

A quick sweep of the place revealed sawdust, wood beams, open paint buckets, rope, and a screwdriver someone forgot on the floor. Bond laid Q against a relatively clean wall and watched the blood pool with a tremble in his heart.

“Go,” came the soft order, spoken through chapped lips and with a clumsy tongue. Q’s eyes were blurred with pain but still so lovely, that eerie green. “There’s no time. I’m still coherent; this is only a smidgeon better than being electrocuted for hours on end. I’ll be in your ear. Go!”

Q was already shivering, his body struggling to maintain his temperature. Bond took off his jacket and placed it tenderly over Q, hoping the combination of body heat and thick lining would keep Q warm and maybe even comfort him a little until Bond came back.

Time, that horrid, accursed thing, was ticking in his ears.

“I’ll come back for you.” It was all Bond could say. “I’ll come back for you, I promise.” And then, with a sour taste in his mouth at the words he hoped wouldn’t make a liar out of him (again), he went.

It took him ten minutes to reach the plaza by foot. Two to locate the bomb and two to disarm it with Q’s careful, slurred instructions in his ear. “It’s done,” he said with thirty-two seconds on the clock and heard Q’s quiet sigh.

“Pity. I would have liked to see the explosion. What a last sight that would have been,” he murmured and then was silent, no matter how loudly Bond called and demanded.

It took him eight minutes to get back to Q.

He was where Bond left him. Now, however, instead of leaning weakly against the wall, he was lying on the cold, dusty ground, Bond’s jacket still tucked around him. His eyes were closed, his face relaxed as if in sleep. He wasn’t moving, and Bond’s heart stopped for a long, still moment.

“Q, answer me!” he demands now, trying not to lose all composure. Medical is still five minutes away, and a piece of him is already beginning to mourn. After a lifetime of killing people, Bond knows that Q has lost too much blood, his heart too weak, and his breath too shallow.

But the rest of him cannot and will not accept defeat until a doctor arrives to tell him he’s lost yet another heart of hearts, and so he continues to attempt to staunch the bleeding. “Stay with me, please - ”

The softest touch on his wrist freezes him in his tracks. Bond glances down to see Q’s hand hovering weakly by his, fingers outstretched in a delicate display of grace. When he looks up again, Q’s eyes are open by a sliver, the small smile on his lips a weak attempt at reassurance.

“There you are,” he says. “You took so long, I decided to take a nap while I was waiting for you.”

Bond chokes on a laugh that’s more of a strangled cry of relief. He stomps down firmly on the hysteria threatening to strangle his throat and wipe away logic and training to say, “Of course you did. How are you feeling?”

Q visibly considers. “Not so bad,” he says. “I thought death would be more exciting, to be honest.”

Bond has always suspected that Q’s strange attitude towards death would come back to bite them. In their usual interactions, it was nice to know that Q was just as much, if not more, laidback about the morbid as a Double-Oh, but now, it only serves to make Bond grit his teeth. “Don’t _joke_ , Q!”

“I’m not,” he protests. “My grandparents were torn apart by a mob, you know. My first cousin once removed was hanged, drawn, and quartered. In comparison, a lucky shot isn’t much to be proud of.”

Bond twitches, the usual mix of exasperation and amusement at Q’s dark statements blending uncomfortably with the fright in his chest at the blood that continues to seep through his jacket. “Death isn’t exactly a competition,” he says, the lesson one he learned the hard way. “Dead is dead.”

Q sighs, eyes falling to half-mast. “Oh, you’re right, I suppose. Still. Do go to my second funeral, Bond. It’ll be lovely; Mother will make sure of it. And let my sister have my corpse. She’ll be utterly delighted.”

Bond shakes his head, removing one hand to hold Q’s outstretched one and putting most of his body weight on the other, to Q’s gasp as his wound is jostled. Where the _fucking_ _hell_ is Medical? “Q. Q, no. Stop.”

“My only regret is that we’ve known each other for so short a time,” Q confesses, soft and dreamy. “If we’re not to have time together in life, then I wouldn’t mind being together in death. I’d like to be buried with you, if you’d allow it.”

Bond grips Q’s hand tighter and all but snarls his repudiation of Q’s serene words. Why must Q be so willing to accept his own death? Is he that eager to go? “Yes, yes, of course I’d allow it - but stop talking like that! You’re not going to die!”

Q seems to pout at that. “Don’t ruin this for me, Bond. You only ever die once. I want to experience this moment in its entirety.” He flexes a bit, winces at the pain, and then settles down again, still with that vague, disturbing smile on his lips. “Oh, brilliant.”

“Q, I swear to _God_ \- ” Bond snaps heatedly, feeling Q slipping out of his fingers like water from a cupped hand and scrambling for a way to stop him, to hold him tight to this plane of existence where Bond can reach him, touch him.

Sirens ring faintly in the distance.

It may be the most beautiful sound Bond has ever heard.

Bond’s eyes light up just as Q groans. “My own death,” he sighs melodramatically. “Ruined. Oh, woe is me, snatched from death’s door. What does a man have to do around here to die in peace?”

“If you wanted a peaceful death,” Bond says, a fine thread of terror beginning to trickle slowly out of his shoulders, although the pressure he puts on his hand remains, “you should have picked a career with less occupational hazards.”

“Don’t talk dirty to me _now_ ,” Q says.

* * *

The sunset here is gorgeous. The golden light reaches into the hospital waiting room and briefly glances over the lone man sitting in one of the uncomfortable chairs, chin resting on his intertwined hands, elbows on his knees.

Blue eyes stare unseeingly at the wall. It’s been hours. He’s been waiting for a long time.

Time drags on, slow as cold syrup. The crimsons and ochres fade to be replaced by midnight blue and then black. The only reason he’s been allowed to remain is his credentials. Passing hospital staff send him sympathetic looks; he ignores them.

With the rush of adrenaline over, with no Q to concentrate on, with no cool mask he has to maintain so that everything doesn’t fall to pieces, Bond has all of the time in the world to review exactly where he went wrong, what he could have done instead, all of his inadequacies.

He’s always such shit at protecting the people who matter.

And he knows damn well operations that take this long don’t mean anything good.

It’s true night when the doors open and a tired doctor comes out to see him. “He’s stable,” he says. “You can see him now.”

Q is nearly always a strange sight, with his eccentric clothes and that fucking black cat that follows him everywhere, but Bond feels a sharp wrench in his chest at the sight of him unconscious and connected to tubes, already pale skin so sallow.

Silently, Bond drags a chair over to Q’s bedside. Taking the hand Q offered him before in both of his, he bends over and touches his forehead to it in a reverence both quiet and slow. It could be an apology, a gesture of protectiveness, a lover’s touch - only Q would know and Q sleeps.

Three hours later, a nurse tentatively pokes her head in. With the only light source in the room the sole window, she sees nothing but dusty silhouettes. One is merged with the bed, fragile and wounded. The other stays close, and the hunch of his back must be uncomfortable but there he stays.

There is something of a silent loveliness in the scene, like a painting she would find in a museum, a study of chiaroscuro and fidelity. Suddenly aware that she’s an intruder, afraid that she’ll disturb whatever it is that she’s stumbled upon, the nurse takes a step back and closes the door again.

Within, Bond goes back to sleep, still holding on tight to Q.

* * *

When Q opens his eyes, the world is a washed-out monochrome, all beautiful blacks and whites. But there are no clear lines, shades of grey bleeding into those lovely crisp blacks and staining the sweet whites.

He feels heavy but buoyant, his mortal body a weight floating in water, and he distinctly remembers a glorious darkness in his dreams.

Even in the emptiness of his sleep, it reached him, silky and midnight and so bitter. But when he touched it, it was all jagged edges and fierce spears, and that had made it all the more delightful. It had come and gone three times, and each time had felt like an eternity and much too short.

Two flickers of colour appear before the soft white of the ceiling. Blue, blue, _blue_. He knows those blues, the blue of _rurihatsutake_ and the poison dart frog and Neptune viewed through a good telescope. It’s -

“Bond?” Q asks but even through the odd muffling in his ears - like Pugsley stuck pig guts in there again - he can tell it’s barely a croak. Belatedly, he registers the desert in his throat and almost coughs his way out of the monochrome world.

“Sssh,” he hears, the familiar voice a rumble of thunder that’s comforting even without the usual accompanying flash of lightning. “You’re alright, Q.” The blues move, disappearing briefly from his vision before returning. There is something cold and wet being held up to his lips.

Ice. He misses the winter despite all of his extremities regularly freezing. There’s just something about the frost that turned all of the grass into blades and the hail that would come pouring down on his childhood home that cultivates that nostalgia in him.

Q lets the ice chip melt in his mouth before asking again, “Bond?”

A hand slips into his, the callouses dragging pleasantly. “You died, Q.” The words are spoken bluntly, flatly.

Q blinks up at the ceiling. “...then this is hell?” He’s immediately disappointed and outraged; he expected some fires at the very least. Meeting a demon or two would have been nice, too. Oh, eternal torture would have been bloody marvellous. But no, _this_ is what he gets?

And it smells like antiseptic, too, which he normally only associates with his sister when she gets up to her more brutal experiments.

A dry, strained laugh is his response. “No need to make that face, Q. They pulled you back. Had to shock you three times before your damned heart started beating again. Sodding stubborn as always.”

“Oh.” Q contemplates this. He isn’t in hell, which is great because it means that actual hell will be better than this, but, well, _he isn’t in hell_. On the plus side, he had the joy of undergoing defibulation three times. Just wait until Wednesday hears about th -

Q gasps, eyes flying wide open. “Bond!”

Bond’s hand tightens around his own. “Q?” he says, sounding alarmed.

Q has other things on his mind. “Quick, take a picture of me right now!” he orders. “My sister will love this.”

Bond groans loudly. “I tell you you almost died and _this_ is your reaction?” he asks disbelievingly with a hint of darker frustration. “You were in surgery for hours before you were stable! You've been out for three days, Q!”

Q goes to dismiss this - he was buried in Mother Earth for an entire day once when his siblings forgot him - before abruptly reconsidering, something snapping together in his soup-thick brain. “Wait, what day it is?”

Bond hesitates. “May 24th - ”

“Yes but what day of the week?” Q interrupts impatiently.

“...Saturday?”

It takes him a minute, but then Q starts giggling. And despite the fact that he can feel Bond’s glare, he can’t stop. They must have him on the good stuff, he thinks between giggles. Most painkillers are the equivalent of sugar pills to him.

To Bond’s credit, he waits for Q to stop his hysterics before asking with an audible growl that sends a shiver down his spine despite the numbness caused by the morphine, “And what exactly is so funny about all of this?”

“Wednesday,” Q manages to gasp out. “I died on a Wednesday. My sister’s name is Wednesday. Oh my god, she’ll never let me hear the end of this!” And with that, he dissolves helplessly into laughter once more.

He hears Bond sigh and then is startled a bit by the blues that are coming closer. Soft lips brush against his forehead, and Q stops laughing, caught by the tenderness in the gesture. It’s not like Bond to be so tentative.

“Why must you be so eager to leave me?” Bond says, and there’s something broken in the honey cadences of his voice, something that prickles at Q’s own otherness.

Q frowns, trying to be serious again. He turns the question over in his mind, picking at it but not finding what he wants. He doesn’t understand what Bond’s asking. “But I don’t want to leave you,” he denies. He rather likes Bond (maybe even loves him), why would he want to go?

“You seemed plenty willing to die back there,” Bond points out harshly, all cold fire and nitrogen ice. “And dying is certainly leaving me.”

Bond’s angry, Q catches on, five minutes too late. And then, oh dear, he didn’t mean to have _this_ conversation high on morphine and in the middle of Indonesia. “It’s...not like that,” Q tries to explain awkwardly, trying to nudge his brain cells into working again.

“Then what’s it like, Q? Tell me,” Bond orders. Despite the violent whip of his voice, his thumb is gentle as it strokes along Q’s pulse rhythmically.

“I just…” Q flounders. Unlike his parents, he’s always been aware of the ways in which their family is different from the rest of the world. He doesn’t try to hide it but he’s never tried to explain it either.

“It was a good way to die,” he says slowly, spelling out what he can clearly articulate first. “I was doing my job, which I love, and with you. And on a Wednesday no less. What more could I ask for?”

There’s a pause, Bond’s thumb halting as he muses on that answer. His tone is softer when he responds, so Q must have said something right. “I would really much prefer it if you don’t die at all.”

Q shakes his head a little, frowning when that makes the world spin around him. “We’re...different.”

Bond makes a neutral noise.

“We...have a different worldview than most...other...people.”

“Mmhm.”

“We...like...death?” Somehow, it ends up like sounding like a question.

Bond sighs again, sounding terribly put-out. “And who is this ‘we’, Q?”

Q blinks up at him. Isn’t it obvious? “We’re the Addams Family, of course,” he says.

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave a comment! I am also on [tumblr](https://opalescentgold.tumblr.com/) so come chat with me.


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